It Wasn't the Same After That

6. 1970: It Wasn’t the Same After That

There’s something about when your girlfriend turns into a donkey that tries a man’s soul; nothing was the same after that.

When we’d been inseparable, Farmgirl started stepping out on her own. We’d spend the day tooling about, Farmer’s Market, playing Rebel Without a Cause at the Observatory, a Day of Healing in Topanga Canyon, but at night a cab would arrive. “I’m going out,” she’d say, and she’d stumble back in by dawn, or not at all. I didn’t see her for six days around New Year’s.

I no longer liked L.A. on my own, when I always had.

I went to Hippie’s. It was there that I saw Laura. She was sitting in Farmgirl’s chair spinning round. There was a houseful and Hippie was serving up a concoction in the glasses with oranges on them. It was Ocean Spray cranberry juice cocktail tainted with mescaline. I took a glass but didn’t drink it. Everyone else tossed it down. I sipped at it and put it on the coffee table.

Laura said “Hi” without a sound emanating from her lips and she slid to the floor wrapping her legs beneath her. She patted the seat of the orange rocker and I sat down in her place. We exchanged pleasantries. She had no idea that my transplant had failed, that I’d had another, that I’d been to Woodstock, but she never got the opportunity to ask; she was tripping, singing along to “Chelsea Morning.” She looked at me with soulful eyes and sang, “Won’t you stay, we’ll put on the day, we’ll wear it till the night comes.” She put her head on my knee and closed her eyes, only opening them again to say, “Crimson crystal beads to beckon.”

It was then that Hadley came through the door. She was with a handsome roughneck who looked like Dennis Wilson, scruffy and bearded; he had on a white pocket-t and jeans. She saw me as she walked in the door and ignored me, caught my eye at last and rolled hers. (He’s my friend, not yours; don’t you dare roll your eyes like I was the one who shouldn’t be here.)

Hippie handed her a juice glass and she drank it down. Laura picked her head up, took my hand and said, “Let’s get out of here.” I downed the rest of the swill from my glass, which tasted of cranberries and rubber, and guided Laura down the stoop, the ground moving out beneath her every step, but she snapped to and we walked down Cherokee to Hollywood Blvd. We got a booth at the Gold Cup, a chicken hawk coffee shop; I hated it, but it was open and there was an empty booth and I’d started hallucinating and a girl behind the front window had French fries that looked delicious. We sat and watched the freaky world go by.

We walked back along the boulevard and then up Cherokee. In front of Hippie’s, Hadley and Dennis Wilson were arguing. He wouldn’t let go of her arm. I tried to step in, but she said, “Stay out of it, Miles. It’s not your business.”

I unlocked the door of the van for Laura and she melted into the seat and we meandered to her place in Echo Park. There was an opossum in a tree and a bright light shown from over the hill; it was late, but the lights were on at Dodgers Stadium. She asked me in and made tea. She had a lovely view and we sat and watched the city in the dark. We listened to Simon & Garfunkel: “Time it was, and what a time it was, it was. A time of innocence. A time of confidences.” “I love that,” she said. She mouthed the words: “Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph, preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left you.” She fell asleep with her head on a pillow looking out the window. I took out my wallet. There was a picture of my father.

The record ejected, and I covered her with an afghan and let myself out. I didn’t want to take the freeway, so I rambled on the surface streets. I stopped at Tommy’s for a chiliburger, the one at 6th and Alvarado.

When I got home, Hadley was at the house. Her eye was bruised, and her make-up smeared; her mascara, like Twiggy’s, heavy and thick, had run in rivulets down her face; pink lipstick was smeared across her left cheek. Her shoulders were black and blue with fingerprints.

I let her into the house and my mother came from her room. She put Hadley into her bedclothes and washed her face with a washcloth, and then she led her to bed. She closed the door and sat down at the kitchen table. She didn’t say anything for a long time. I guess she was reading my mind. And then she said, “You can’t save her.” Until she said it I hadn’t realized that Farmgirl needed saving.

“Everyone has always saved me,” I said.

In the morning her bruises were fresh and obvious: a black eye, those fingerprints in a blackish green; her lip, swollen. She got up, had a piece of toast, left half of it, and a cup of tea with so much sugar it was thick. Then she went back to bed. She was sick for two days, running to the bathroom, and when I could, I held her hair up and out of the commode; until I didn’t want to anymore. She smelled like drama and headaches.

I woke up on the third day and she was tripping. I don’t know what she had on her, but I knew. Her head was bobbing like an old man falling asleep in church. My mother said, “She can’t stay in my house like that.”

“So, what do I do? Just throw her out? I’m not gonna do that.” She looked at me and Hadley nodded, a bobble head doll in full agreement.

And then she came to. She got up for breakfast and there was a twinkle in her eye, like Farmgirl was in there somewhere, and I made her sunny-side eggs and toast and Farmer John’s breakfast links. My mother came home that afternoon and Hadley was dressed and looked nice. She’d put make-up on her black eye and the bruises were gone from her white shoulders.

I had tickets for The Byrds and my mother put on a pot of sauce and we had spaghetti and meatballs, and then we left for the show.

The Ash Grove was a folk club on Melrose Ave. with a roughhewn façade and a colorful striped marquee. With each performance they’d paint signs in crude white letters that looked like dialogue bubbles from a comic strip. They’d say “Doc Watson” or “Phil Ochs” or “Joan Baez,” or tonight, “The Byrds,” although Roger McGuinn was the only one left. Gram Parsons was dead and David Crosby was in CSN&Y, and Chris Hillman joined the Flying Burrito Brothers. They were still good, but it was a sign of the times. They did “My Back Pages” and “The Ballad of Easy Rider” and “Eight Miles High,” the guitar all out of control, like Coltrane, jazzed out and structureless, and Hadley was there next to me with her funky dance, and I started spacing to the groove, and then she was gone.

I’d forgotten: she was the girl who disappeared.

I looked for her. I asked a girl coming out of the ladies’ room. I saw Hippie; he hadn’t seen her. I waited around. The dark frenetic aura of the gig, with the flick of a switch, was flooded with stark white light, and slowly the crowd dispersed, a few stragglers at the bar, and then a sweep of the floor and everyone was asked to leave.

Hippie was on the corner. He said, “She’s wired differently, man.” We walked down toward LaBrea. It was understood we were going to Pink’s. He said, “She’s the kind of girl who drops the fuck out. Like, she’s trying to see if you can handle it. Can you?”

The same woman had been at Pink’s for as long as I could remember. She had a distinctive way of putting the chili on the hot dog; she moved the dog and not the spoon. She had a white uniform like a nurse, just like all the others, but not a spot on it. I had a tendency to wear my food. I don’t know how she did it.

I didn’t answer Hippie’s inquiry. I didn’t know the answer. When I left New York, I knew I had to find her, and I did, and she was looking for me too.

I didn’t know if I’d end up looking for her again, but I knew she was gone. I wasn’t going to get home and find her sitting on the porch, her mascara-laden face in hand. I opened the glove box in the V-dub. When she’d left the last time, she left me a guitar pick, something she’d found at Woodstock; the implication and the fantasy were that it belonged to Hendrix. It too was gone, and I spent a week looking for it.

Donkey Island and the Blue Fairy

4. Donkey Island.

In the morning, Hippie made egg sandwiches with Taylor ham and cheese, and there was coffee. He made frozen concentrated orange juice and cut up bananas and strawberries. He had a yellow gingham cotton tablecloth and the juice glasses had oranges painted on them. Hippie was very domestic. Still, it was far too hot for November, smoggy and oppressive; earthquake weather. The morning was a perfect storm of pretty and horrible. It was unsettling.

There was a half-sheet of blotter stamps and Hippie unhinged three of them. He ate his. Farmgirl licked the back of hers. I hesitated and put my head in my hands. “Headache,” I said. Hadley picked up the little orange stamp, handed it to me and said, “This will make you feel better.”

Hippie had a brand-new Datsun 510. It was green. It had that new car smell, mixed with pot. I sat in the back, in the middle, and hung my head over the front seat. I didn’t know where we were going.  We stopped at the Hollywood Ranch Market. There was a map from The Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out on the back seat of the car. When you bought the record, you sent in a dollar and they mailed you a map of L.A.’s “Freak Out Hot Spots.” In it were all the cool places in L.A., Bido-Lito’s and Ben Frank’s and The Troubadour. A lot of the places were closed now, like Pandora’s Box and The Trip. The map was wrinkled and dog-eared and Hippie had marked it up with the places he’d been. I said, “This is your map?”

Farmgirl took it and read, “‘Hollywood Ranch Market; a good place to see some real freaks.’ I want to go there,” she said. Hippie said we could, but that freaks don’t get up at 10:00 in the morning. We got some Mexican sodas and Hadley took pictures, then we headed out the Interstate to Ojai. The Datsun had air conditioning and it was cool and Hippie played Let It Bleed on the 8-track.

I started peaking with “Monkey Man” and was really tripping with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Hippie was singing, “If you try sometimes,” he sang, and he thumped on the steering wheel. We were out of the smog and into the clear skies amidst the orange groves and the lemons, and then we passed the colonnaded boulevard, like a cloister with cars and restaurants. The moon was out and hanging there in the deep endless blue. We turned into a trailer park filled with palm trees and Airstreams. Hippie said the hills were the Topatopa mountains and I couldn’t stop saying it. Topatopa; it kept resounding in my head.

The trailer was his grandparents’ and his grandmother, whose hair was lavender, as was her sweater, was standing out in front, waving. She wore a paisley blouse beneath her seater; periwinkle, I’d call it. Her pants were the color of eggplant and her sandals were plum. His grandfather wore a golf shirt and a lemon-yellow sweater like Andy Williams. His hair was silver and full in a wavy pompadour. The Airstream too was silver, and it sat amongst the date palms and the coconut palms and the yucca. His grandmother brought out lemonade and we sat at a picnic table. Her name was Ceil and she told incomprehensible stories. Hippie would laugh or say, “I remember.”

Ceil had a big tin of buttons, thousands of them, and she was sorting through each, putting them on the table, making piles of red or piles of white, but one pile was simply colors that looked nice together. All the while I could say nothing, as if I were mute. Then his grandmother brought out a tray of sandwiches with the same keen eye as Hippie. “These are delicious,” I burst out. “Delicious.”

Hippie gave us each another tab of STP, my reluctance quelled by the necessity to swallow it before his grandmother returned, having stepped back into the trailer for more ice; his grandfather never sitting down, watering flowers, kicking stones into place.

I grew up watching PBS on channel 28. It didn’t come in well, but it was all good shows: Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and The Friendly Giant and Sesame Street. The reception would pucker in and out and go all horizontal, and the sound would catch and stop. Tuning into the STP was just like that, as if I needed to adjust the horizontal and the vertical, to mess with the bunny ears.

All I said was “Delicious,” but when we left, Hippie’s grandmother said, “It was a pleasure to talk with you,” and she put out her hand. Her hand was soft and fragile and cold to the touch. To Hadley she said, “And you’re just as cute as a button,” and then she laughed. Grandfather Hippie shook my hand, grasping it tightly, and we piled, I would imagine comically, into the Datsun.

We rode back down the boulevard through the colonnade and as we passed the Spanish belfry, there appeared up ahead a carnival. There was a merry-go-round and a Ferris wheel. It was the late afternoon and the lights were coming on. There was a funhouse with those crazy stairs and a big neon sign that said, “Lost City.” There was laughter, frightening laughter and there was music from a calliope.

We went on a ride. It was nothing but dark and frightening, and a thousand degrees. It was like Dante’s Inferno. There was Limbo and lust and anger. There was heresy and violence and fraud. We had hot dogs and sodas, so there was gluttony as well. We walked by the Lost City and a creature popped up as Hippie passed. He jumped and then he laughed, but his laugh was more of a bray. And when I looked over there was some odd transformation manifesting itself across his face and his long hair twitched and, suddenly, two long furry ears appeared, standing up straight. I looked over at Farmgirl and there was the same kind of wicked revelation. Between her pigtails there were the ears of a donkey and she brayed and her teeth were bucked and looked nothing like Hadley’s but for the space between them. I stopped and as she passed I noticed that she had sprouted a tail. It grew and it wagged and it swatted a fly. There was a wavy mirror and I caught a glance at myself. The three of us were donkeys, braying at one another like in Pinocchio, still dressed in jeans and t-shirts.

5. The Blue Fairy

After that, it wasn’t the same.

Without a lot of exaggeration, our adventures had us outfoxed, murderers attempted to hang us from a tree (I’ll spare you the details); there was that incident when the puppeteer tried to use us for firewood; and, of course, the occurrence at Donkey Island led to our being swallowed by a whale. The talking cricket, who I may have neglected to mention earlier, was well aware that naughty boys and girls remain who they are.

But he’s dead now.

I’m being pedantic, of course, but on our way home a tire blew out. The Datsun careened off Highway 101 through a barbed-wire fence and we hit a cow, an unfortunate bovine who didn’t budge while the Datsun 510 crumpled around it. Okay, it was a cow and not a whale, but you can grasp the allusion. Hippie broke his nose on the steering wheel. Farmgirl was fine, and so was I, until I got out of the car and sidled up against the barbed wire.

Then we met the Blue Fairy. I banged on the door of a cottage up the road and she came to the window. “No one,” she said, “lives in this house. Everyone is dead.”

“Won’t you at least open the door?”

“I am also dead.”

“Dead? What are you doing at the window then?”

“I am waiting for the coffin to take me away.”

That’s what I remember, at least. We stayed that night at a Holiday Inn.

My Head is My Only House Unless it Rains

When I write for AM, the overarching premise is to provide an inclusive history of rock music. AM tends to dwell on 50 years ago, but is equally enthralled with Kate Bush or Weezer or Rainbow Kitten Surprise. The writing of Calif., though, only allows for the music from the story era - The Mothers, The Moodys, Captain Beefheart, The Doors, Cream, Jefferson Airplane or Love. Many of these bands would peak in the Calif. era. Now keep in mind that the goal of any novelist is to sell some books and so I try to strike a balance by not being too obtuse. That in mind, you'll note that Chapter 3 referenced Zappa and Beefheart, a bit obscure for most readers, but essential to the era.

The song that spins over and again in my mind is the seminal "My Head is My Only House Unless it Rains." Listening to, "Dachau Blues," "Pachuco Cadaver" or "Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish" on Captain Beefheart's surreal 1969 masterpiece Trout Mask Replica would hardly incline one to bracket Don van Vliet within the great balladeers. Yet here, barely three years later, he came up with as achingly beautiful a song of love and longing as one could wish to hear. The Magic Band (largely intact from the crazed Trout Mask sessions) are in fine form, featuring the fluid lead guitar of Zoot Horn Rollo (Bill Harkleroad) in counterpoint to rhythm guitarist Rockette Morton (Mark Boston) and bass player Orejón (Roy Estrada). And that's percussionist Ed Marimba (Art Tripp) on, appropriately, the marimba.

From experience, I can recommend reciting the lyrics to this song at a wedding. "I won't sleep until I find you/ I won't eat until I find you/ My heart won't beat until I wrap my arms around you" – there will not be a dry eye in the house. As much as I've wallowed in the Beefheart version, it's really the cover by San Francisco’s underrated The Tubes that rings most true in my ears. Fe Waybill’s heart-wrenching rendition was supposedly recorded with the band up on mushrooms, and I can envision that image as a vignette for the song. In it our stoned hero's heart won’t beat, he’ll take a train or a bus or a plain until he finds her; indeed, the man’s head is his only house. The sequence intersperses these lyrics of intense ennui with visions of the lost/estranged love; all in hues of purple and gray.

If you're a Beefheart fan, but one that's never ventured beyond Trout Mask Replica, listen to "My Head's" tonight with headphones. Not a fan, listen to The Tubes' version – might turn you on to Captain B. Mushrooms, of course, may help as well.

3. Days of Wine and Roses, November/December 1969

I don’t know why I felt so far removed from my mother. She grieved like I did for my father and, worse, she nearly buried a son, but the urge to leave again was overwhelming. She’d take us to lunch and she’d tell her stories and I know, I know, he only used one napkin.

She said I should reacquaint myself with my little sister, but I didn’t know her at all. Hadley and I took her to the beach and to the Tastee-Freez and to Disneyland. She was so lovely to be around; her face so sweet and gentle. We played this game with the radio in the car. They’d play a song and the first to guess got a point. She knew them all. She liked “Lady Madonna” and “Ruby Tuesday” and The BeeGees’ “Holiday.” She sang with Hadley: “Dee, de, dede, de, dee – de de dee, deet dee, dee dee,” and she tried to make her voice like Maurice Gibbs’.

Days turned into weeks and a feeling of restlessness set in. We started to hang out at Hippie’s. Don the Hippie had been a friend since high school. His parents had gobs more money than anyone else’s; his father some kind of pyro-technician for the movies. If it exploded on film, Hippie’s father was in on it.

In their basement, his father had a train set like Gomez Addams’. There was a car wreck at an intersection. A mangled HO-scale station wagon was upside down on a turntable, spinning slowly, as if the accident had only just happened. There were thugs in front of a liquor store with knives and tiny little drunkards on Skid Row, but just down the block was a family Bar-B-Q with kids on a swing, and a man walking his dog, and a woman coming out of a shop with pink packages. Coolest train set ever.

Hippie was the product of that crazy affluence. He’d never had to work and never did. A talented artist, his drawings would sit half undone, and you’d ring the bell and he wouldn’t answer. You’d hear the music and open the door and he’d be there, fully immersed in side-three of the White Album or Tommy or “Whole Lotta Love.”

Never startled, he’d open his eyes and say, “Hey, can I get you something?” He took a shine to Farmgirl and she liked his big orange chair by the window. There was something about the geometry of L.A. at night, and the vistas and the lights, that struck her as magic.

The first night we were there he served us lemonade in jelly glasses with the Flintstones on them and he asked about the trip and about Woodstock. I told him the story, about Hendrix and meeting Farmgirl and what Lori Upton had done for me. “She gave you a kidney?”

“I know.”

“Sensational.” It was an odd response, but it was Hippie all the way through.

“I was at Led Zeppelin, at a venue like a circus, and I sat on the stage in front of a wall of amplifiers and I could feel it, it was so loud, and that was it. Next thing I knew I was in the hospital, my mother holding my hand.”

Hadley said, “You never told me this.”

“Why, of course, I have.”

“You never did.”

“Are you mad?”

“Of course, I’m not mad. You coulda told me.” We were there a lot after that, high off Hippie’s generosity. We did a lot of acid, Purple Microdot and Orange Sunshine; little stamps of blotter or tabs, and we’d watch old movies: Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling or Pat Boone singing “April Love.”

But it was like the Days of Wine and Roses. It started out so cool, an idea, like psychedelics were “a blueprint to a harmonious life.” Farmgirl said that from the orange chair. We were listening to Surrealistic Pillow. There are those two pretty songs in a row by Marty Balin, “Today” and “Coming Back to Me.”

And she was right. We sat in Hippie’s digs and the colors were brighter and the guitars were crisp and clean and the smell of orange blossoms on the air was intoxicating, but then the news came on the color TV, which was always on; hippies were rioting in Hollywood. “You see, you see,” she said. “They seek to undermine us, to destroy us, to belittle us and beat us down.” A policeman was on the screen with a Billy club.

Then there was a commercial for Noxema shaving cream, and then Grace Slick was singing about Alice. We watched the sunset (on acid). We drove through the canyons (on acid). We went to the Van Nuys drive-in to see Alice’s Restaurant (on acid). Then one night we went to a gig: The Mothers of Invention and Captain Beefheart. Hippie said, take these. It was STP. “What’s this?” I asked.

“STP.”

“Like for your car? Like ‘the Racer’s Edge?’”

“Like for ‘Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace.”

They didn’t do anything. We were high on hashish and Captain Beefheart was dissonant and nothing made any sense, and then Hippie handed us each another tab. When somebody handed you something, you took it; it was just polite. Softly the discordance lightened and Beefheart performed a new song. They said it wasn’t on an album. They said it was a love song. It was called “My Head is My Only House Unless It Rains.” It was beautiful, and then the STP kicked in and it was powerful and none of us, Hippie even, knew that the drug was like time-released. Then we were too high.

I began to experience this overwhelming feeling of joy and completeness; I felt the universe was mine, and mine alone. I was the greatest I would ever be. I could hardly bear the happiness. And Zappa was jamming in a plaid suit like someone in a bank and we had hamburgers, delicious, delicious. I had only friends, no enemies. God was with me. I was alpha and omega.

I sat on the shag carpeting. It was soft; the softest thing I ever touched. The color of the rug indescribable. Like a rainbow. I saw the Moaning Lisa and a giraffe, his legs spread, drinking from a swimming pool. The Mutual of Omaha. Applause, applause.

Farmgirl tapped my shoulder and said, “I think I’m going to throw up.”

2. Home

The house smelled of my family and the eucalyptus in the backyard. It smelled of my father. He’d been gone for more than a year; his death a feeling I harbored everywhere but here. Here, he still had a presence; I wouldn’t have been surprised to find him sitting in the lawn chair, looking out over the Valley.

The house was as I’d left it, Johnny Mathis’ Greatest Hits leaning against the stereo console, the bread on the counter with the mail and the Nestle’s Quik. Three months had passed, and nothing had changed.

There was joy at my return; my kid sister, Anna, was filled with a delight that faded again when she realized I wasn’t staying. “You’re going, then?” my mother asked. “Stay. A couple days. Just stay and relax. Get reacquainted with your sister.” It was Hadley who said we should.

“It’s nice here. I’d like to see L.A.” It wasn’t the plan.

We hadn’t eaten anything since Barney’s Beanery, so my mother made us grilled-cheese sandwiches. When she put the plates before us I touched her hand and said, “For a little while.”

In the morning, I carted everything out of the van and threw my clothes in the wash along with Hadley’s. The washer was in the kitchen with a round glass door that looked like a contact lens, and amidst the soap suds and churning water, our clothes comingled, her t-shirts wrapping their arms around mine, a dress drawn up and panties swept aside.

I washed the van and vacuumed and arranged the magnets of the states on the dashboard. I had on my jeans and a pair of zorries and no shirt and Farmgirl came to the front door in my striped Hang Ten t. I had on my transistor radio and The Beach Boys were bursting with good vibrations.

“No one home?” she shouted. I shook my head.

“There’s coffee. Sleep okay?” She didn’t answer, then I heard the stereo. She was flipping through the dial. Amidst the static and the flutter, I heard Anne Murray’s “Snowbird” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” and then she stopped at “Honky Tonk Woman.” I could see her through the window, dancing.

I put the clothes in the dryer and got us each a big mug of coffee. I nodded my head toward the backyard and we sat under the eucalyptus tree. She said, “This is nice.” It was. Nice just to sit under a tree and look out over the Valley, the smog settling down into the basin, eradicating the silver San Berdoos, the mountaintops peaking up over the ashen mire.

I kept my stash in an old Beech-Nut Chewing gum tin and lit up a joint. The leaves of the old eucalyptus were gray on the underside and the wind would pick up and they’d be green, and gray, and green and they’d rustle together. Hadley stretched out her arms and her t-shirt hitched up and I took a sip of my coffee and I noticed: her pussy, which she’d shaved of all things, was so beautiful; just a little line; how could just a little line be so beautiful? And she looked at me and sang, “Oh no, oh no. Oh no no no no no,” and she wagged her finger. “I’m gonna get dressed.”

My mother took us to Chris and Pitts for dinner. It was my father’s favorite. I liked it too. The floor was red cement and they threw down sawdust. There was a counter at the front like a diner and Remington paintings and old brass, and outside was a big neon sign that said “Bar-B-Q Now Open.” It cast a warm red glow into the restaurant. She told a story about my father; the one she always told, about how he could eat a rack of ribs and use just one napkin. It was a skill he had of which she was proud. Hadley ate three pieces of garlic bread and my mother asked where she put it.

Later that night Farmgirl and I went to the Whiskey to see the Velvet Underground. It wasn’t crowded. L.A. didn’t take a shine to New York, like there was some kind of resentment, but we got to stand at the front under the cage with the go-go girl, and that was a plus. It was kind of raw; the guitars had a heavy wail, kind of tinny, and there was discordance despite the music’s simplicity. The first song was called “I’m Waiting for the Man;” a simple story about a guy on Lexington and 125th Street waiting for the pusherman. People hassle him and he blows them off. When the dealer fixes him up, he goes home and his girlfriend’s all mad because he’s loaded, but he’s like, “What the hell, I feel good.” It was pretty heavy, and maybe it explained the animosity; like L.A. was all la-de-dah and psychedelic and Orange Sunshine, and New York was dark and high and evil.

Afterward, we went to Ben Frank’s and had coffee. We sat there for hours. Hadley said, “I think the whole act is like a parody, self-aware of how limiting and pathetic the life of a junkie is.”

“Wow. Sometimes I forget how smart you are.”

“Cause I’m off the farm.”

“Yeah.”

Suddenly friends arrived, and it was awkward. The girl’s name was Paris Smith. It struck me how strange it was to have a name at once so odd and so plain. With her was Lane who’d slid his motorcycle under a tractor trailer, and although he’d come a long way, his feet still dangled a half-pace behind. He had those forearm crutches with the cuffs and he sidled down the aisle behind Paris. He slid into the booth next to ours. It was awkward because I’d slept with her after the accident. I knew just how miserable she was, but she’d stayed at his side out of guilt or duty. It was remarkable and sad. As soon as I saw Paris come in the door I put a ten dollar bill on the table and called over the waitress. Then we made our excuses and left.

In the car, she said, “So, you slept with her; and you feel guilty about it.”

“What do you want me to say?” I don’t know how she knew.

“Nothing. You don’t have to say anything. There’s just no reason for anyone to feel guilty about making themselves happy. It’s a disservice not to be self-serving. Heck, I mean, look at that girl. She’s unhappy; she’s throwing her life away for this guy. Out of what, out of guilt?

“When I was little,” she said, “my parents put me on a plane so I could see my grandmaw. When the stewardess went over the safety guidelines and all, the thing that stuck in my head was you’re supposed to put on your own oxygen mask first. You can’t help people if you can’t breathe.”

She looked at me. “That girl can’t breathe. You can’t make people happy if you’re not happy yourself. She ain’t makin’ him happy, and the reality is, nothing’s going to. Ever. It’s too late, and she’s caught up in it.”

“I don’t know; that’s a little mean.”

“It’s not mean. It’s just life. He’ll remain bitter and unhappy and ruin her, and she’s so pretty.”

When we got home she said, “I’m kinda hungry.” I made her toast. She loved toast. I don’t know where she put it.

What's It All About, Alfie?

So many of you follow my daily musings on rock music, and while AM prides itself in embracing great music from every era, there's a tendency to focus on the classic era of rock that roughly begins with "Satisfaction" and ends with Prog. Punk starts a new era with The Sex Pistols as a catalyst and culminating with The Clash and Joy Division. With the exception of Weezer and Radiohead, we tend to kinda skip the 90s. The whole emo thing kept us motivated in the naughts and today, thankfully, there are bands like Lord Huron and Rainbow Kitten Surprise. Here's the video I'm obsessed with at the moment.



Over the past three years, AM has had more than half a million unique hits. I've shared with you fictional passages from my novels Jay and the Americans - which is available on Amazon and for your Kindle (read it for free on Kindle Unlimited) - and Miles From Nowhere, a novel about Woodstock, scheduled for publication later this year. Miles takes place nearly 50 years ago with a time frame that begins in July 1969 and ends in October that same year.

The sequel to Miles From Nowhere is my current work, Calif. I'm on page 162. The action takes place from 1969 and throughout the classic rock era. The music within its pages ranges from Cat Stevens to CSN, from Joni Mitchell to the Grateful Dead. Music essentially becomes a character in the novel. 

The other day I had this brainstorm to share the writing of Calif., all its bruises and misspellings, as a way for the reader to experience the writing process and my racing thoughts. I'll intersperse chapters from the novel as I write and revise them and toss in my whims and frustrations. It's a bit of an experiment that I don't think has been tried before. The tentative cover art for Calif. is the masthead of this new blog based on a line-drawing I created, of which I hope you approve. When something sucks or makes no sense, let me know. I'm thrilled about the first line, by the way, so don't even try it. 

I love the places that I've never been.

1. Barney's Beanery

1. Barney’s Beanery, October 1969

“I love the places that I’ve never been,” she said. Farmgirl stared out the window like a puppy. “There it is!” I knew where it was; I’d grown up in L.A. Barney’s Beanery, Santa Monica Blvd., the beginning or the end of Route 66. We took a booth by the pool table. There was a book of matches in the ashtray that said, “Fagots Stay Out.”

Two guys who looked like Jim Morrison were playing Eight Ball and arguing; the first was the young Jim; the other, the fat one with the beard. I liked them both. I had a chili-size and Hadley, Farmgirl, had a Coke and an order of fries with a side of gravy. As the waitress walked away she said, “Gravy is so much better than ketchup it’s not even worth talking about.”

Why Do I Have This? Chicago?

When the Morrisons left, Farmgirl jumped up to grab the table. She stood at the register with a dollar bill and got quarters from a scroungy old guy who shaved his gray whiskers but missed spots, like a poorly mown lawn. She pushed her quarter into the slot and the balls tunneled down. She set them up, shuffled them about, put the eight ball in the middle and broke the rack; two stripes went into each of the far pockets. “You playin’?” she said, “I’m eating,” I said. I enjoyed a chili-size, and this was a particularly good one. The carny atmosphere, the multi-colored booths and license plates, the jukebox playing “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” all lent themselves to how delicious it was. Chili is short for chili con carne, by the way, which is Spanish for meat with chilis. Does it say chili con carne con frijoles? No, and at Barney’s Beanery, despite the eponymous name, the waitress, an older woman named Alice, knew to ask. Maybe I have a no-bean face.

Farmgirl said, “Scared?” as she sank another stripe in the side pocket.

“Of you? Kinda.”

“Hey bud,” she said, “Fagots Stay Out.”

I picked up the matchbook. “Mine says, ‘No Bitches.”

For hundreds of miles, from the Grand Canyon to be specific, she’d been focused on the sea. She’d never seen the ocean, yet there were stops to make along the way, or out of the way; the places she’d never been, and Barney’s Beanery was the roadhouse – you kept your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel. Maybe Morrison would be there, the real one. Maybe Janis Joplin. Across the way was a topless bar and the Alta Cienega, a sordid little motel where Morrison lived before he moved up into the canyon, before he moved to Love Street.

She wanted to watch the sunset over the ocean and I figured we ought to go. I called over the waitress as Hadley sank the eight ball. I thought we’d drive down the Strip by the Whiskey and the billboards, so we turned west onto Sunset off La Cienega by the Chateau Marmont. We stopped in the parking lot by a hot dog stand in an old Union Pacific railway car. She wanted to take pictures.

Up the hill was one of those rock billboards that line the Strip: three guys sitting on an old couch; one of them was David Crosby. It was half done. There was a man was up on the gantry in white overalls. He had brushes coming out of his back pocket and he was splattered with paint. It was odd, there was a young boy sitting atop the billboard’s scaffolding drinking from a paper cup and a straw. Every once in a while, the man stepped back and observed his work. He’d say something, and the boy would look at him. He was about 12, and he sat with a leg up. He wore jean cutoffs and a striped t-shirt. He looked like California.

A gust of wind blew a white paper bag from the scaffolding. It fell and twisted in an eddy, then rose again, the boy watching it. Napkins flew from out of the bag taking their own path. Hadley took a picture, the white sack and napkins floating through the air, the young boy watching, the man painting and the Chateau Marmont rising over it all like a castle.

We rode down Sunset past the Beverly Hills Hotel and the mansions, the V-dub hugging the twisty thoroughfare. The sun was sinking toward the horizon and we raced on to catch it, winding down the boulevard to the sea. We parked at Will Rogers beach and the cool of the afternoon settled into the sand. Hadley ran from the VW. “It’s so cool and…” she didn’t finish her sentence, she was so filled with joy. The sky went orange, then purple then black. On the radio was The Shangri-Las: “Oh no, oh no; Oh no no no no no.” Farmgirl took my hand. She sang, “Remember, walking in the sand,” then she pointed to the first star.